High Tide volume drop: What are your thoughts on the investigation?
I used to be pretty neutral about the whole investigation into the stock manipulation. I’m not sure if it’s just seasonal patterns or macro factors playing into it, but the daily average volume really feels like it has dipped lately and it honestly looks like Raj might be right. Just look at today, the market has been open for an hour and only about 40,000 shares have traded. That is crazy low. I’ve been following this stock for over two years now and I can’t remember ever seeing the volume this low.
With this thread, I wanted to check what you guys think it looks like? If the investigation actually finds historical digital footprints of spoofing and naked shorting, do you think Hiti should sue them to set an example? It would show everyone that it’s dangerous to mess with them, and they could potentially get some hefty damages while showing they actually look after their shareholders. Or do you think Raj will skip all that because he just wants to get the lid off the stock price as fast as possible?
I actually asked an AI to give me some examples of this happening before, and this was the answer I got.
The company that best mirrors High Tide, and that actually managed to prove manipulation and start a war against Wall Street, is the e-commerce giant Overstock.com, ticker OSTK. This case is legendary in the financial world because it shows exactly how a stubborn CEO used digital footprints and forensic data to prove that market makers and hedge funds were cheating under the hood.
Here are the details on how they did it and what happened to the stock price afterwards.
Back in the early 2000s, Overstock was a fast growing and revolutionary e-commerce company. But just like High Tide, their CEO Patrick Byrne noticed a completely illogical pattern. The company was absolutely crushing its quarterly reports, but the stock price just plummeted or was brutally manipulated sideways instead of ripping upwards. Byrne went out in the media and claimed there was a Sith Lord on Wall Street, meaning a coordinated group of hedge funds and market makers, that deliberately manipulated his stock. The entire financial elite just laughed at him and called him a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but Byrne refused to give up.
Overstock ended up doing exactly what Raj Grover is doing now. They stopped talking and started gathering hard digital data instead. Their most important move was tracking what is called Fails to Deliver, or FTDs. This happens when a short seller sells a stock but never delivers the actual shares to the buyer when settlement day comes. It is the ultimate digital proof of naked shorting, where they sell phantom shares that don't exist just to artificially suppress the price.
Overstock also hired external experts, just like High Tide's investigators, who combed through Nasdaq's order books microsecond by microsecond. They found millions of digital footprints of spoofing and coordinated algorithms, where massive sell blocks were put out and canceled in milliseconds just to scare off buyers. They even managed to prove that certain large market makers used their special liquidity rules to systematically help specific hedge funds short the stock illegally without ever borrowing the shares.
In 2007, Overstock went to court and filed a massive civil lawsuit against the absolute elite of Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley. The burden of proof was huge, but the digital footprints from the order books were impossible to argue with. After years of brutal legal battles, the financial giants realized they were going to lose. To prevent the SEC from pulling their licenses, they were forced into settlements and had to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages directly to Overstock. But most importantly, they were forced to shut down their manipulative algorithms in the OSTK stock for good.
When those hostile algorithms were finally turned off and the lid blew off the spring, a massive upside liquidity shock happened. During the manipulation years, the stock had been beaten down to rock bottom prices. But once the market was forced to clean up its act, and Overstock kept showing good growth at the same time, the stock price exploded over the following years. It went from lows around 3 to 5 dollars all the way up to over 120 dollars, triggering a massive short squeeze and total euphoria.
Here is some daily avg data so you can judge for yourself: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/quote/HITI/history/?frequency=1d
